Bones and Silence

⚖The case for it

Loud, crude, slow off the mark: Dalziel is not built to charm, and Hill makes you wait while the case gets going. Stick with it. Few crime writers of the 1990s put as much weight into their sentences as into their puzzles, and Hill manages it without ever nudging you in the ribs. His detective is a bully with a theory, sure of himself well beyond where most readers would stay comfortable, and that discomfort is what Hill is after. Coarse company, granted, but the prose repays the trouble.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Hill plants two plots and lets one starve the other. Dalziel witnesses a death and insists it was murder on stubbornness alone, while letters from an anonymous suicidal woman arrive between chapters, a tease the book strings out for four hundred pages before paying off with deliberate cruelty. The mystery-play business, Dalziel cast as God, is a joke Hill works too hard.

— the honest librarian